Chapter 18 international relations - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Tony Clarke, 1996, “Mechanisms of Corporate Rule”. Chapter 18 international relations. On the left is a map of McDonalds in Rome. The picture above is only partly in jest. How much more powerful today?

Copyright Complaint Adult Content Flag as Inappropriate

I am the owner, or an agent authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the copyrighted work described.

Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author.While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server.

Nation-states compete with other states to lure corporations and their capital to their countries. This often means enacting policies that benefit the TNCs at the detriment of the public interest. “Through this process, stateless corporations are effectively transforming nation-states to suit their interests.”

“In the 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) used debt renegotiations as a club to force the developing nations into implementing structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in their economies…The SAP measures included large-scale deregulation, privatization, currency devaluation, social spending cuts, lower corporate taxes, expansion of the export of natural resources and agricultural products, and removal of foreign investment restrictions…In effect, the SAPs have become instruments for the recolonization of many developing countries in the South in the interest of TNCs and banks.” These policies are the Washington Consensus policies spoken of at the beginning of the course.

Critics of the economic policies and ideologies of the IMF and World Bank argue that their policies increase poverty and reduce the standard of living in countries where these policies are implemented.

Since 1980 there has been a push to implement these same policies in the United States with much the same effect.

“In country after country there has been a massive deregulation of finance and mergers between commercial and investment banking.” This was written in 1996. In 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagal Act which had prevented these mergers. The Glass-Steagal Act had been put in place in the aftermath of the Great Depression in 1933 to control speculation.

“…transnational manufacturing firms can quickly move their operations around the world, in search of cheap labor, more profitable investment opportunities, and freedom from the demands of unionized workers…there is a very real danger that the forces of global competition will drag workers everywhere down to the lowest common wage standards.”

Transnational food corporations are demanding an end to the system of agricultural subsidies, regulation, and protection that has maintained a relatively cheap food policy in the industrial North.

To pay debts, poor countries in the South “are forced to turn over valuable agricultural lands to transnational agribusinesses and to convert to cash-crop production.”

“’Export or die’ is the message, but ‘export and die’ is the reality.”

Similar to Southern sharecroppers during reconstruction forced to grow cotton to maintain their credit. Because they could not eat their cotton, they were forced to buy food on credit from the same general store who was extending the credit.

This was one of the symptoms of impending nation-state failure that Rotberg talked about.

“Most people now feel that they have lost control over their economic, social, and ecological future. This is not only true among the poor majority in the South, following the damage done by massive SAPs, but increasingly among the majority of working, middle-class peoples in the North.”

“The emergence of the corporate state, however, wherein the reins of democratic governance have been taken over by corporations and banks, has completely disfigured and distorted the responsibilities of the national governments. The moral and political obligations of nation-states to intervene in the market economy have been eliminated (think Gailbraith and the absence of power in economic thought) in order to ensure that the entire national system – economic, fiscal, social, cultural, environmental, political – functions for the purpose of providing a profitable climate for transnational investment and competition in the new global economy.”

“Further the idea that sovereignty precludes outside intervention doesn’t hold up. Small, poor countries are routinely dominated and influenced by larger and more powerful countries.” From the Clarke reading we find that sovereignty is also challenged by TNCs/MNCs, the IMF, and the World Bank.

This has its place for developing infant industries. The United States was able to industrialize effectively due to protectionist policies. After a time, however, protectionist policies become a method to protect monopoly profits by a preferred industry. Most industrialized countries modernized under protectionist policies.

George Bush spoke of crusades as we invaded two Muslim countries. He scored points with Christian fundamentalists, but Muslims had reason for concern. Similar to saying, Come on boys, it’s Wounded Knee all over again!”